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April 2021 - Greetings to any of you who happen to stumble onto this site. There are lots more websites and Youtube videos that pertain to Pohnpei these days, but this one harks back to a fair different time: 1968-71.
Welcome to John's Pohnpei Site!
I call this website Box of Pohnpei in honor of the assortment of containers that have held my books, papers, photographs, and other artifacts saved from Pohnpei or added to the pile later. These once included a full set of Oral English teacher's manuals by Gloria M. Tate, which I taught from for three years in elementary and junior high schools in Pohnpei.
I suspect that some of the readers of this essay also have a box or two like this. My fellow volunteer and recent traveling companion, Jack Gillmar, has a box collection that puts mine to shame. After starting out as a PICS (Ponape Island Central School) high school teacher, Jack worked with Harvey Segal at PONTEC (Ponape Teacher Education Center) and saved a large number of training materials and official documents from being thrown out of the high school library by an overly zealous principal.
When Jack and Janet and I returned from Pohnpei last spring, Jack brought out--excavated, really--his treasure trove, and I got to look at books and pamphlets I had either never seen before or not seen for more than forty years. He is still trying to find a way to donate them to the College of Micronesia library.
The Trip Itself
The travelogue of my return to Pohnpei in May, 2013, is segmented to spare you from scrolling through stories and ruminations that happened off island. When I added material to my handwritten diary and when I wrote letters to Elaine, I often went off the tracks into some pet theme that occurred to me at the moment. Those topics are listed in the column on the left.
What you will read in the following links is pretty much just what I did and saw on the trip.
Why I Decided Not to Go (ha ha)
Article I Published in a Magazine
My Pohnpei Talk to the Kansas RPCVs in Wichita
Fellow Micro 7 Pohnpei Volunteer Lorry (Smith) Shoniber invited me to drive down to Wichita in 2014, to reflect on my return to the island during the previous year. I took along a set of PowerPoint slides that resulted in a talk of about an hour. I started this website by converting that talk into the the page below.
Stories About My Years in Pohnpei
The links below take you to several stories from the booklet I self-published from 1990 to 1995. It was called Hedge Apple and Devil's Claw. Each of the stories appeared in a different edition of the booklet, so I brought them together to share conveniently on the website.
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